Once
again, we’re focusing on how IT leaders are improving their business
performance for better access, use and analysis of their data and
information. This time we’re coming to you directly from the recent HP Vertica Big Data Conference in Boston.

So please join me now in welcoming Craig Snodgrass, Senior Vice President for Analytics and Product at Cardlytics Inc., based in Atlanta. Welcome, Craig. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Craig Snodgrass: Thanks for having me.

Gardner: At some point, you must have had a data infrastructure or legacy
setup that wasn't meeting your requirements. Tell us a little bit about
the journey that you've been on gaining better analytic results for
your business.

Snodgrass: As with any other company, our data was growing and growing and
growing. Also growing at the same time was the number of advertisers
that we were working with. Since our advertisers spanned multiple
categories -- they range from automotive, to retail, to restaurants, to
quick-serve -- the types of questions they were asking were different.

So
we had this intersection of more data and different questions happening
at a vertical level. Using our existing platform, we just couldn't
answer those questions in a timely manner, and we couldn't iterate around
being able to give our advertisers even more insights, because it was
just taking too long.

First, we weren’t able to even get
answers. Then, when there was the back-and-forth of wanting to
understand more or get more insight it just ended up taking
longer-and-longer. So at the end of the day, it came down to multiple
and unstructured questions, and we just couldn't get our old systems to respond fast
enough.

Gardner: Tell us a bit about Cardlytics. Who are your customers, and what do you do for them?

Growing the business

Snodgrass:
Our customers are essentially anybody who wants to grow their business.
That's probably a common answer, but they are advertisers. They're
folks who are used to traditional media, where when they do a TV or
radio ad. They're hitting everybody, people that were going to come to
their store anyways and people who probably weren’t going to come to
their store.

We're
able to target who they want to bring into their store through looking
at both debit-card and credit-card purchase data, all in an anonymized
manner. We’re able to look at past spending behavior, and say, based on
those spending behaviors, that these are the types of customers that are
most likely to come to your store and more importantly, most likely to
be a long-term customer for you.

We can target those,
we can deliver the advertising in the form of a reward, meaning the
customer actually gets something for the advertising experience. We
deliver that through their bank.

The bank is able to
do this for their customers as well. The reward comes from the bank, and
the advertiser gets a new channel to go bring in business. Then, we can
track for them over time what their return on ad-spend is. That’s not
an advantage they’ve had before with the traditional advertising they’ve
been doing.

It
works inside of retail, just as well as restaurants, subscriptions, and
the other categories that are out there as well.

Gardner: So it sounds like a win,
win, win. As a consumer, I'm going to get offers that are something more
than a blanket. It's going to be something targeted to me as the bank
that’s providing the credit card. They're going to get loyalty by having
a rewards effort that works. Then, of course, those people selling
goods and services have a new way of reaching and marketing those goods
and services in a way they can measure.

Snodgrass:
Yeah, and back to this idea of the multiple verticals. It
works inside of retail, just as well as restaurants, subscriptions, and
the other categories that are out there as well. So it's not just a
one-category type reward.

Gardner: But to make
it work, to make that value come across to the consumer, it needs to be a quality targeted effort. Therefore you need to take a lot of data and do a
lot of queries.

Snodgrass: You got it. A
customer will know quickly when something is not relevant. If you bring
in a customer for whom it may not be relevant or they weren’t the right
customer, they're not going to return.

The advertiser
isn't going to get their return on ad-spend. So it's actually in both
our interests to make sure we choose the right customers, because we
want to get that return on ad-spend for the advertisers as well.

Gardner: Craig, what sort of volume of data are we talking about here?

Intersecting growth

Snodgrass: We're doing roughly 10 terabytes
a year. From a volume standpoint, it's a combination of not just the
number of transactions we're bringing in, but the number of requests,
queries, and answers that we’re having to go against it. That
intersection of growth in volume and growth in questions is happening at
the same time.

For us right now, our data is
structured. I know a lot of companies are working on the unstructured
piece. We're in a world where in the payment systems and banking
systems, the data is relatively structured and that's what we get, which
is great. Our questions are unstructured. They're everywhere from
corporate real estate types of questions, to loyalty, to just random
questions that they've never known before.

One key
thing that we can do for advertisers is, at a minimum, answer two large
questions. What is my market share in an area? Typically, advertisers
only know when customers come into their store with that transaction.
They don't know where that customer goes and, obviously, they don't know
when people don’t come into their store.

We have that
full 360-degree view of what happens at the customer level, so we can
answer, for a geographic area or whatever area that an advertiser wants,
what is their market share and how is their market share trending
week-to-week.

The other piece is that when we do
targeting, there could be somebody that visits a location three times
over a certain time period. You don't know if they're somebody who shops
the category 30 times or if they only shop them three times. We can
actually answer share-of-wallet for a customer, and you can use that in
targeting, designing your campaigns, and more importantly, in analysis.
What's going on with these customers?

For us, with Vertica,
one of the key components isn't just the speed, but how quick we can
scale if the number of queries goes up.

Gardner:
So this is any marketers' dream. This is what people have been trying to
do and thinking about doing for decades, and now we’re able to get
there. One of the characteristics, though, if I understand your challenge
from a data-processing perspective, is not only the volume. You're
going to have many different queries hitting this at once, because
you have so many different verticals and customers. The better job you
do, the more queries will be generated.

Snodgrass: It's a self-fulfilling prophesy. For us, with Vertica,
one of the key components isn't just the speed, but how quick we can
scale if the number of queries goes up. It's relatively easy to predict
what our growth and data volume is going to be. It is not easy for me to
predict what the growth in queries is going to be. Again, as
advertisers understand what types of questions we can answer, it's
unfortunately a ratio of 10 to 1. Once they understand something, there
are 10 other questions that come out of it.

We can
quickly add nodes and scalability to manage the increase in volumes of
queries, and it's cheap. This is not expensive hardware that you have to
put in. That is one of the main decision points we had. Most people
understand HP Vertica on the speed piece, but that and the quick
scalability of the infrastructure were critical for us.

Gardner: Just as your marketing customers want to be able to predict their spend and the return on investment (ROI)
from it, do you sense that you can predict and appreciate, when you
scale with HP Vertica what your costs will be? Is there a big question mark
or do you have a sense of, I do this and I have to pay that?

Snodgrass:
It is the "I do this and I'll have to pay that," the linearness. For
those who understand Vertica, that’s a bit of a pun, but the linear
relationship is that if we need to scale, all we need to do is this.
It's very easy to forecast. I may not know the date for when I need to
add something, but I definitely know what the cost will be when we need
to add it.

Compare and contrast

Gardner:
How do you measure, in addition to that predictability of cost, your
benefits? Are there any speeds and feeds that you can share that compare
and contrast and might help us better understand how well this works?

Snodgrass: There are two numbers. During the POC
phase, we had a set of 10 to 15 different queries that we used as a
baseline. We saw anywhere from 500x to 1,000x or 1,500x speed in return
of getting that data. So that’s the first bullet point.

The
second is that there were queries that we just couldn't get to finish.
At some point, when you let it go long enough, you just don't know if it
is going to converge. With Vertica, we haven't hit that limit yet.

Vertica has also allowed to have varying degrees of analysts’ capabilities when it comes to SQL
writing. Some are elegant and they write fantastic, very efficient
queries. Others are still learning the best way to go put the queries
together. They will still always return with Vertica. In the legacy
world prior to Vertica, those are the ones that just wouldn't return.

In a SaaS shop, there are a lot of
things that you're going to do in SaaS that you are not going to go do
in SQL

I
don’t know the exact number for how much more productive they are, but
the fact that their queries are always returning, and returning in a
timely manner, obviously has dramatically increased their productivity.
So it's a hard one to measure, but forget how fast the queries have
returned, the productivity of our analyst has gone up dramatically.

Gardner:
What could an analytics platform do better for you? What would you like
to see coming down the pipeline in terms of features, function, and
performance?

Snodgrass: If you could do something in SQL, Vertica is fantastic. We'd like more integration with R, more integration with software as a service (SaaS),
more integration with these sophisticated tools. If you get all the
data into their systems, maybe they can manipulate it in a certain way,
but then, you are managing two systems.

Vertica is
working on a little bit better integration with R through distributed R,
but there's also SaaS as well. In a SaaS shop, there are a lot of
things that you're going to do in SaaS that you are not going to go do
in SQL. That next level of analytics integration is where we would love
to go see the product go.

Gardner: Last
question. Do you expect that there will be different types of data and
information that you could bring to bear on this? Perhaps
some sort of camera, sensor of some sort, point-of-sale
information, or mobile and geospatial information that could be brought
to bear? How important is it for you to have a platform that can
accommodate seemingly almost any number of different information types
and formats?

Snodgrass: The best way to answer
that one is that we don't ever want to tell business development that
the reason they can't pursue a path is because we don't have a platform
that can support that.

Different paths

Today,
I don't know where the future holds from these different paths, but
there are so many different paths we can go down. It's not just the
Vertica component, but the HP HAVEn
components and the fact that they can integrate with a lot of the
unstructured, I think they call it “the human data versus the machine
data.”

It's having the human data pathway open to us.
We don't want to be the limiting factor for why somebody would want to
do something. That's another bullet point for HP Vertica in our camp. If a
business model comes out, we can support it.

Gardner: Clearly there's a revolution taking place in retail, and it sounds like you are on the vanguard of that.

I don't know where the future holds from these different paths, but
there are so many different paths we can go down.

Snodgrass: Yeah, I agree.

Gardner:
Okay, well I'm afraid we'll have to leave it there. We've been learning
how data-intensive credit card marketing services provider Cardlytics
is providing millions of highly tailored marketing offers to their
banking consumers and customers for marketing activities in sales across
the U.S.

And we've also heard how they deployed an HP
Vertica Analytics Platform to provide better analytics to deliver those
insights to these many customers. So a big thank you to
our guest, Craig Snodgrass, Senior Vice President for Analytics and
Product at Cardlytics.

Snodgrass: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner:
And thank you also to our audience for joining us for this special HP
Discover Podcast coming to you directly from the recent HP Vertica
Big Data Conference in Boston.

I'm Dana Gardner,
Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing
series of HP sponsored discussions. Thanks again for joining, and come
back next time.

Transcript
of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how a marketing company uses HP
Vertica to match advertisers with potential customers across an ever-growing expanse of data and queries. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2013. All
rights reserved.

Once
again, we’re focusing on how IT leaders are improving their business
performance for better access, use and analysis of their data and
information. This time we’re coming to you directly from the recent HP Vertica Big Data Conference in Boston.

Our next innovation case study highlights how a healthcare solutions provider leverages big-data capabilities. We’ll see how they deployed the HP Vertica Analytics
platform to help their customers better understand population
healthcare trends, as well as to help them run their own systems
internally.

To learn more about how high performing and
cost effective big data processing forms a foundational element to
improving healthcare quality and efficiency, please join me now in
welcoming our guest, Dan Woicke, Director of Enterprise Systems Management at Cerner Corp. based in Kansas City, Missouri. Welcome, Dan. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Dan Woicke: First of all, thank you very much for having me. It’s my first time in Boston. So I'm having a blast here.

Gardner: Terrific.
Let’s start at a high level and talk a little bit about why, in the
healthcare industry in particular, big data is super important. We're
going through some major transitions in how payments are going to be
made and how even the definition of good care is defined. We're moving from pay for procedures to more pay for outcomes. So tell me about
Cerner, and why big data is such a big deal.

Woicke:
Obviously, you hit the nail on the head. The key element here is that
the payment structure is changing to more of an outcome model. In order
for that to happen, we need to get all the sources of data from many,
many disparate systems, bring them in, and let our analysts work on what
the right trends are and predict quality outcomes, so that you can
repeat those and stay profitable in the new system.

Gardner: It’s interesting that, on one side of the coin, you're looking to bring large data sets
together to analyze what’s going on in the field, but in order to allow
you to better serve those needs, you also have big IT systems. They're
putting out a lot of data, and you need to analyze them. Tell us a little bit about two ways in which big data is being employed there at Cerner.

Woicke:
We’ll touch on more of the clinical side of how we are processing this
data in the new model. My direct responsibility is to bring in massive
amounts of performance data. This is how our Cerner Millennium systems
are running.

We have hundreds of clients, both in the data center and those that manage their own systems with their own database administrators (DBAs). The challenge is just to have a huge system like that running with tens of thousands of clinicians on the system.

We
need to make sure that we have the right data in place in order to
measure how systems are running and then be able to predict how those
systems will run in the future. If things are happening that might be
going negative, how can we take the massive amounts of data that are
coming into our new analytical platform, correlate those parameters,
predict what’s going to happen, and then take action before there is a
negative?

Effect change

We want to be able to predict what’s happening, so that we can effect change before there is a negative impact on the system.

Gardner:
Everybody, almost across any business you talk to, wants to be more
proactive and get out in front of these issues. Tell me how big data and
the ability to manage big data gets you closer to the real time and
then, ultimately, proactive.

Woicke: Since
January of this year, we've started to bring in what we call Response
Time Measurement System (RTMS) records. For example, when a doctor or a
nurse is in our electronic medical record (EMR)
system is signing an order, I can tell you how long it took to log into
the system. I can tell you how long you were in the charting module.

All those transactions produce 10 billion timers, per month, across all of our clients. We bring those all into our HP Vertica Data Warehouse. Right now, it’s about a two-hour response time, but my goal, within the next 12 months, is to get it down to 10 minutes.

I
can see in real time when trends are happening, either positive or
negative, and be able to take action before there is an issue.

Gardner:
That’s impressive. Tell us a little bit about Cerner and describe the
company -- what they do, and this idea that you have not just your own
systems, but you're managing systems that other people use as well.

Woicke:
We have two data centers in Kansas City, Missouri and we host more than
half for our clients in those data centers. The trend is moving toward
being remote-hosted managed like that. We still have a couple of hundred
clients that are managing their own Millennium domains. As I said before, we need to make sure that we provide the same quality of service to both those sets of clients.

Gardner:
So you're used primarily by healthcare organizations. Tell us how you
actually function within healthcare and the services that you provide to
these organizations.

Woicke: We run the
largest EMR in the world. We have well over 400 domains to manage -- we
call them domains -- which allows us to hook up multiple facilities to
those domains. Once we have multiple facilities connecting into those
domains, at any given time, there are tens of thousands clinicians on
the system at one time.

Gardner: I'm still
trying to tease out a little bit of more understanding of the function
that you provide to these health providers. Are you doing their medical
records inventory for them or do you have a set of applications in
addition to that? Help us understand better what services you provide.

Single database

Woicke:
Cerner Millennium is a suite of products or solutions. Millennium is a
platform where the EMR is placed into a single database. Then, we have
about 55 different solutions that go on top of that platform, starting
with ambulatory solutions. This year was really neat. We were able to
launch our first ambulatory iPad application.

There
are about 55 different solutions, and it's growing all the time with
surgery and lab that fit into the Cerner Millennium system. So we do have
a cohesive set of data all within one database, which makes us unique.

Gardner:
Before we go to some more insights about the healthcare industry,
population health, and some of the great analytics that can be brought
there, let’s drill down a little bit into what you're doing on site.
Where does the data come from primarily? Is this log information. Do you
have a set of management systems of your own, and how much data we are
talking about?

Woicke: We're talking about quite a bit of data, and that’s why we had to transform something away from a traditional OLTP database into an MPP type database, because those systems that are now sending data to Cerner.

We have claims data, and HL7
messages. We're going to get all our continuous care records from
Millenium. We have other EMRs. So that’s pretty much the first time that
we're bringing in other EMR records.

What that's going to do is bring the total cost of your healthcare down, which is really the goal.

We
have health-plan enrollments, and then of course, within Millennium,
we're going to drill down into outcomes, re-admissions, diagnosis, and
allergies. That’s the data that we need to be able to predict what kind
of care we are going to have in the future.

Gardner:
Now, you're also looking to how you can better understand the
marketplace and provide insights, so that people can literally change on
a dime, change the wings on the airplane while it’s still in the air,
if you will, in healthcare and population health. What are the insights
that you can get there and what are the data sets that you need in order
to do that?

Woicke: The data sets are similar
to what we just discussed. You’ll have that claim data that comes in
from multiple sources, multiple EMRs, but the whole goal of population
health is to get a population to manage their own health. That means
that we need to give them the tools in their hands. And they need to be
accurate, so that they can make the right decisions in the future. What
that's going to do is bring the total cost of your healthcare down,
which is really the goal.

Gardner: So it seems to me that we talk about "Internet of things."
We're also going to the "Internet of people." More information from
them about their health comes back and benefits you and benefits the
healthcare providers. But ultimately, they can also provide great
insights to the patients themselves.

Do you see, in
the not too distant future, applications where certain data --
well-protected and governed of course -- is made into services and
insights that allow for a better proactive approach to health.

Proactive approach

Woicke:
Without a doubt. We're actually endorsing this internally within the
company by launching our own weight-loss challenges, where we're taking
our medical records and putting them on the web, so that we have access
to them from home.

I can go on the site right now and
manage my own health. I can track the number of steps I'm doing. Those
are the types of tools that we need to launch to the population, so that
they endorse that good behavior, which will ultimately change their
quality of life.

Gardner: Then, there is also
this notion of anonymized patient information, where you can take an
aggregate and find out what works and what doesn’t work when it comes to
behavior, patterns of fruition when it comes to things like weight
loss. Tell me how that grander view, the holistic view of the data,
comes to bear as well.

Woicke: Right now,
we're in production with the operation side that we talked about a
little bit about earlier. Then, we are in production with what we call
Health Facts, a huge set of blinded data. We hire a team of analysts and
scientists to go through this data and look for trends.

You can see what that’s going to do for the speed of the amount of
analysis we could do on the same amount of data. It’s game changing.

It’s
something we haven’t been able to do until recently, until we got HP
Vertica. I am going to give you a good example. We had analysts log a SQL
query to do an exploratory type of analysis on the data. They would log
that at 5 p.m., then issue it, and hopefully, by the time they came
back at 8 a.m. the next day, that query would be done.

In
Vertica, we've timed those queries at between two and five seconds. So
you can see what that’s going to do for the speed of the amount of
analysis we could do on the same amount of data. It’s game changing.

Gardner:
Let me ask you, Dan, about that process through which you acquired
Vertica. How did you adopt it? What were some of the requirements, and
why didn’t some of the other alternatives work out?

Woicke:
There were a lot of competitors that would have worked out, but we had a
set of criteria that we drilled down on. We were trying to make it as
scientific as possible and very, very thorough. So we built a score
sheet, and each of us from the operation side and Health Facts side
graded and weighted each of those categories that we were going to judge
during the proof of concept (POC). We ended up doing six POCs.

We
got down to two, and it was a hard choice. But with the throughput that
we got from Vertica, their performance, and the number of simultaneous
users on the system at a given period of time, it was the right choice
for us.

Gardner: And because we're talking about healthcare, costs are super important. Was there a return on investment (ROI) or cost benefit involved as well?

Extremely competitive

Woicke:
Absolutely. You could imagine that this would be the one or two top
categories weighted on our score sheet, but certainly HP Vertica is
extremely competitive, compared to some of the others that we looked at.

Gardner:
Dan, looking to the future, what do you expect your requirements to be,
say, two years from now? Is there a trajectory that you need to take as
an organization, and how does that compare to where you see Vertica
going?

Woicke: Having Vertica as a partner, we
navigate that together. They invited me here to Boston to sit on the
user board. It was really neat to sit right there with [HP Vertica General Manager] Colin Mahony
at the same table and be able to say, "This is what we need. These are
our needs coming around the corner," and have him listen and be able to
take action on that. That was pretty impressive.

To
answer your question though, it’s more and more data. I was describing
the operations side, where we bring in 10 billion RTMS records. There's
going to be another 10 billion type of records coming in from other
sources, CPU, Memory, Disk I/O, everything can be measured.

We
want to bring it into Vertica, because I'm going to be able to do some
correlation against something we were talking about. If I know that the
RTMS records show a negative performance that's going to happen within
the next 10-15 minutes, I can figure out which one of those operational
parameters is most affecting that outcome of that performance, and then
can send the analyst directly in to mitigate that problem.

By bringing in more and more data and being able to correlate it, we're
going to show all the clients, as well as the providers, how their
system is doing.

On the EMR side, it’s more data
as well. On the operations side, we're going to apply this to other
enterprises to bring in more data to connect to the experts. So there is
always somebody out there. That’s the expert. What we're going to do is
connect the provider with the payers and the patient to complete that
triangle in population health. That’s where we're going in the next few
months.

Gardner: I certainly think that managing
data effectively is a huge component of our healthcare challenge here
in the United States, and of course, you're operating in about 19
countries. So this is something that will be a benefit to almost any
market where efficiency, productivity, quality of care come to bear.

Woicke:
At Cerner Corp., we're really big on transparency. We have a
system right now called the Lights On Network, where we are taking these
parameters and bringing them into a website. We show everything to the
client, how they're performing and how the system is doing. By bringing
in more and more data and being able to correlate it, we're going to
show all the clients, as well as the providers, how their system is
doing.

Gardner: Well, great. I'm afraid we’ll
have to leave it there. We've been learning about how a healthcare
solutions provider has been leveraging big-data capabilities, and we've
seen how at Cerner Corp. they've deployed HP Vertica Analytics
Platform to help their customers better understand population health
trends, as well as to gain terrific insights into their own systems and
the systems that they host for others.

Transcript
of a Briefings Direct podcast on how a large provider of healthcare
services is providing insight into patient outcomes as well as EMR
system performance. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2013. All
rights reserved.

Monday, November 04, 2013

Transcript
of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how two companies are enhancing their
services and transforming their businesses using VMware cloud-computing
infrastructure and a unified approach to cloud-infrastructure
management.

Our next innovator panel interview focuses on how two companies are using aggressive cloud-computing strategies to deliver applications to their end users. We'll hear how healthcare patient-experience improvement provider Press Ganey and project and portfolio management provider Planview are both exploiting cloud efficiencies and agility.

To understand how, please join me now in welcoming our guests, Greg Ericson, Senior Vice President and Chief Innovation Officer at Press Ganey Associates in South Bend, Indiana, and Patrick Tickle, Executive Vice President of Products at Planview Inc. in Austin, Texas. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

We're hearing a lot about cloud computing here at VMworld, and you're
going at it a little differently, thinking about making the best use of
infrastructure and services on-premises, off-premises and hybrid. Let's
start with you, Greg. Tell us a bit about the type of cloud approach
you’re taking, and then we’ll want to learn a little bit more about your
businesses as well.

Greg Ericson: We started this
journey in July of 2012 and we set out to achieve multiple goals. Number
one, we wanted to position Press Ganey's software as solution products of the next generation and have a platform that was able to support
them.

We went through a journey of consolidating multiple data centers. We consolidated 14 different storage arrays
in our process and, most importantly, we were able to position our
analytic solutions to be able to take on exponentially more data and
provide that to our clients.

Gardner: Tell us a little about your company, what you do, and how people benefit from these applications.

Gardner:
Patrick, how has cloud helped you at Planview? You were, at one time, a fully a
non-cloud organization. Tell us about your journey.

Patrick Tickle: I'll answer a
little bit about the company, because it sets the context for what we're
doing. Planview has been an enterprise software vendor, a classic
best-of-breed focused enterprise software vendor, in this project and
portfolio and resource management space for over 20 years.

We have a big global customer base of on-premise
customers that built up over the last 23 years. Obviously, in the world
of software these days, there's a fairly seismic big shift about being
in software as a service (SaaS) and how you get to the cloud, the business models, and all those kinds of things.

Conventional
wisdom is for a lot it was that you can't get there unless you start
from scratch. Obviously, because this is the only thing we do, it was
pretty imperative that we figure out a way to get there.

So
two or three years ago, we started trying to make the transition. There
were a lot of things we had to go through, not just from an
infrastructure standpoint, but from a business model and delivery
standpoint, etc.

The essence was here. We didn’t have
time to rewrite a code base in which we've invested 10-plus years and
hundreds of thousands of hours of customer experience to be a
market-leading product in our space. It could take five years to rewrite
it. Compared to where we were 10 years ago, when you and I first met,
there are a lot more tools in the bag for people to get to the cloud
that there were then.

So we really went after VMware
and did the research sweep much more aggressively. We started out with
our own kind of infrastructure that we bolted together and moved to a FlexPod in our second generation.

It's been a big transition for us, but the technology from VMware has been right in the center of making it happen.

Business challenges

Gardner:
Greg, tell us a little bit about some of the business challenges that
are driving your IT requirements that, in turn, make the cloud model
attractive. Is this a growth issue? Is this a complexity issue? What are
your business imperatives that make your IT requirements?

Ericson:
That’s a great question. Press Ganey is a 25-year-old organization. We
pioneered the concept of patient experience and the analytics, and
insight into the patient experience, within the healthcare setting. We
have an organization that's steeped in history, and so there are
multiple things that we're looking at.

Number one, we have one of the largest protected health information (PHI)
databases in the United States. So we felt that we had to have a very
secure and robust solution to provide to our clients, because they trust
us with their data.

Number two, with the healthcare
reform, the focus on patient experience is somewhat mandatory, whereas
before, it was somewhat voluntary. Now, it's regulated or it's part of
the healthcare reform. When you look at organizations, some were
actually coming to us and saying, "We want to get however many patient
surveys out that we need to satisfy our threshold."

Our scientists are also finding a correlation between the patient experience results and clinical and quality outcomes.

Our
philosophy is why would you want to do that? We believe that if you can
understand and leverage the different media to be able to fill that
out, you can survey your entire population of patients that are coming
into not only your institution but, in the accountable care
organization, the entire ecosystem that you’re serving. That gives you
tremendous insight into what's going on with those patients.

So for us, going from minimally
surveying your population to doing census survey, which is your entire
population, represents an exponential growth. The last thing is that,
for our future, in terms of going after some of those new analytics,
some of the new insight that we want to provide our clients, we want to
position the technology to be able to take us there.

We believe that the VMware vCloud Suite
represents a completeness of vision. It represents a complete a single
pane of glass into managing the enterprise and, longer-term, as we
become more sophisticated in identifying our data and as the industry
matures, we think that a public cloud, a hybrid cloud, is in the future
for us, and we're preparing for that.

Gardner:
And this must be a challenge for you, not only in terms of supporting
the applications, but also those data sets. You're getting some larger
data sets and they could be distributed. So the cloud model suits your
data needs over time as well?

Deeper insights

Ericson:
Absolutely. It gives us the opportunity to be able to apply technology
in the most cost-value proposition for the solutions that we’re serving
up for our customers.

Our current environment is around 600 server instances. We have about 300 terabytes (TB)
running in 20 SaaS applications, and we're growing exponentially each
month, as we continue to provide that deeper insight for our customers.

Gardner: Patrick, for your organization what are some of the business drivers that then translate into IT requirements?

Tickle:
As I talked about, obviously the macro trend of SaaS was just a
tectonic shift in software. So it was not just an issue of how Planview would
evolve as a company in that space, but certainly as someone who has
always viewed themselves as market leader, we want to make sure we're as
relevant as we possibly can be. More and more customers and prospects
were starting to either demand, or at least want to look at, SaaS as an
option in our space.

So it was really important, at the
end of the day, for us to be able to address the largest addressable
market for our solution. If we weren’t going to have a SaaS option, we
were going to take big piece of the market off the table.

We had to move from an IT culture to an OPs culture and all the things that go along with that, performance and up time.

That
was probably the biggest driver. From an IT perspective, it changed the
culture of the company, moving from being a on-premise perpetual kind
of "ship the software and have a customer care organization that focuses
on bug and break-fix" to a service-delivery model. There were a lot of
things that rippled through that whole thing.

At the
end of the day, we had to move from an IT culture to an operations culture and
all the things that go along with that, performance and up-time. Our
customer base is global. So it was being able to provide that around the
globe is. All those things were pretty significant shifts from an IT
perspective.

We went from a company that had a corporate IT group to a company that has a hosting and DevOps and Ops team that has a little bit of spend in corporate IT.

Gardner:
Because your resource management and planning activities span many
vertical industries, a large geographic area of many users, how have you
made the transition to SaaS in terms of deployment? You have a single
data center. You do colo. Do you have any plans for hybrid? How does it translate into the best, most efficient way to support all those users?

Tickle: Out of the gate, the first step at Planview was moving to colo. SunGard
has been a great partner for us over the last couple of years as our
ping, power, and pipe. Then, in our first generation, as I may have said
before, we bolted together some of our storage and computer
infrastructure because it wasn’t quite all the way there. Then, in our
most recent incarnation of the infrastructure we’re using FlexPods at
SunGard in Austin, Texas and London.

OPEX spend

We're
always having to evaluate future footprints. But ultimately, like many
companies, we would like to convert that infrastructure investment from a
capital spend into an OPEX spend. And that’s what’s compelling with vCloud Hybrid Service.

What
we've been excited about hearing from VMware is not just providing the
performance and the scalability, but the compatibility and the economic
model that says we’re building this for people who want to just move virtual machines (VMs).
We understand how big the opportunity is, and that’s going to open up
more of a public cloud opportunity for us to evaluate for a wide variety
of use cases going forward.

Gardner: Greg,
back to your situation at Press Ganey with cloud. What are some of the pay offs? Are
these soft payoffs of productivity and automation or are there hard
numbers about return on investment (ROI) or moving more to a operation cost versus capital cost? What do you get when you do cloud right?

Ericson:
We justify the investment based on consolidation of our data centers,
consolidation and retirement of our storage arrays, and so on. That’s
from a hard-savings perspective. From a soft-savings perspective,
clearly in an environment that was not virtualized, virtualizing the environment represented a significant cost avoidance.

Our focus is on a complete solution that allows us to really focus in on
what's important for us, what's important for our clients.

Longer-term,
we're looking at how to position the organization with a robust,
virtual secured infrastructure that runs with a minimum amount of
technical resources, so that we can focus most of our efforts on
delivering innovative applications to our clients.

The
biggest opportunity for us is to focus there. As you look at the size
of the data set and the growth of those data sets, positioning
infrastructure to be able to stay with you is exciting for us and it’s a
value proposition for our clients.

Gardner:
It’s interesting that you're both saying that you don't want to be too
much in the weeds, that you want to focus on your businesses, on your
logic and data and find the means to transition IT to a more modern
infrastructure.

You've said, Greg, that you like the
fact that VMware is giving you options across the board. It's not your
bolt-on to someone else's, or you go find someone else to integrate what's more of a complete package. Tell me a little bit about this whole
greater than the sum of the parts benefit, Greg.

Ericson:
That’s an excellent point, at least from my experience. In fact, most
recently, I spent tens of thousands of dollars troubleshooting open-source products, and we've had some kernel issues that caused us a significant amount of pain.

So
for us, the level of resources and the technical cost of the resources
to be able to assemble the components does not represent a value-add to
our clients. Our focus is on a complete solution that allows us to
really focus in on what's important for us, what's important for our
clients.

Entire environment

With
a minimum amount of staff, we were able to move in nine months and
virtualize our entire environment. When you talk about 600 servers and
300 TB of data, that's a pretty sizable enterprise and we're fully
leveraging the vCloud Suite.

Gardner: Some people say that a single point of management, when you have that comprehensive suite approach, comes in pretty handy, too.

Ericson:
It does, because it gives you the capability of managing through a
single pane of glass across your environments. I was going to accentuate
that we’re about 50 percent complete in building on our catalog.

For
our next steps, number one is that we’re looking at building upon the excellence of Press Ganey and
building our next-generation enterprise data warehouse. We’re looking at
leveraging from a DevOps perspective the VMware vCloud Suite, and we already
have some pilots that are up and running. We'll continue to build that
out.

Not only are we maximizing our assets in delivering a secure environment
for our clients, but we're also really working toward what I call
engineering to zero.

As we deploy, not only are
we maximizing our assets in delivering a secure environment for our
clients, but we're also really working toward what I call engineering to
zero. We’re completely automating and virtualizing those deployments
and we're able to move those deployments, as we go from dev to test, and
test to user acceptance testing, and then into a production
environment.

Tickle: As we all know, there are lot of hypervisors
out there. We can all get that technology from a wide variety of
sources. But to your question about the value with the stack, that’s
what's we look at and again. What's important now is not just the
product stack, but the services stack.

We look at a company like VMware and say, "Site Recovery Manager in conjunction with vCloud Hybrid Services brings a disaster recovery (DR) solution to me as SaaS vendor and that fits with my architecture and brings that service stack plus."

There's
no comparing another hypervisor vendor to build out that stack of
service. Again, we could probably talk about probably numerous, but
that’s when I listen to the things that go on at the event and get to
spend time with the people at VMware. That whole value stack that VMware
is investing in is what looks so much more compelling than just picking
pieces of technology.

Gardner: So we've heard
how a data strategy aligns well with the stack. We've heard how software
development is moving to more iterations and rapid Agile deployment
aligns with the stack. We've heard about how moving toward hybrid cloud
models also would align with the stack.

It sounds as
if there's a common theme here. Looking to the future, Greg, based on
what you've heard here at VMworld about the general availability of
vCloud Hybrid Services and the upgrade to the suite of private cloud
support, what has you most excited? Was there something that surprised
you? What is in the future road map for you?

A step further

Ericson: A couple of different things. The next release of NSX
is exciting for us. It allows us to be able to take the virtualization
of our network a step further. Also to be able to connect hypervisors
into a hybrid-cloud situation is something that, as we evolve our
maturity in terms of managing our data, is going to be exciting for us.

One
of the areas that we're still teasing out and want to explore is how to
tie in that accelerator for a big-data application into that. Probably,
in 2014, what we're looking at is how to take this environment and
really move from a DR kind of environment to a high-availability
environment. I believe that we’re architected for that and because of
the virtualization we can do that with a minimum amount of investment.

Gardner: Patrick, you talked about how you like the notion of what I call fungibility of being able to move workloads.

We can't afford to have half of the company’s OPEX go into IT, while
we’re trying to make customers as successful as they possibly can.

Gardner:
So you transformed your business, moving from client-server
to SaaS. What's interesting to you and your future when you can take
these work loads, choose where they're going to be, and get that built
in DR and business continuity benefit?

How big a deal is it when we can, with just a click of a mouse, move workloads to any support environment we want?

Tickle:
It's a huge deal. Whether it’s a production environment or DR
environment, at the end of the day it's a big deal for both of us. For a
SaaS company the only matter is renewals. It’s happy customers that
renew. That transition from perpetual-plus maintenance to a renewal
model, where you're on the customer service watch at another level, and
it's every minute of every day.

Everything that we can
do to make the customer experience, not just from our UI and our
software, but obviously the delivery of the service, as compelling as
possible, allows us to run our business. That can be a disaster scenario
or just great performance across our geography where we have customers
and then to do that in a cost effective way that operates inside our
business model, our profit and loss.

So our
shareholders are equally pleased with their turn off. We can't afford to
have half of the company’s OPEX go into IT, while we’re trying to make
customers as successful as they possibly can. We continue to be
encouraged that we’re on a great path with the stack that we're seeing
to get there.

Gardner: I think it's fair to say
that cloud is not just repaving old cow paths, that cloud is really
transforming your entire business. Do you agree, Greg?

Rejuvenate legacy

Ericson: I agree. It allows us, especially an organization that’s 25 years steeped in history, to be able to rejuvenate our legacy applications
and be able to deliver those with maximum speed, maximizing our
resources, and delivering them in a secure environment. But it also
allows us to be able to grow, to flex, and to be able to rejuvenate and
organically transform the organization. It's pretty exciting for us and
it adds a lot of value to our clients indirectly.

Gardner:
Well, great, I'm afraid we'll have to leave it there. We've been
talking about how healthcare patient-experience improvement firm Press
Ganey and portfolio and project management provider Planview are
enhancing their services and even transforming their businesses
vis-à-vis cloud-computing infrastructure and a unified approach to
cloud-infrastructure management.

Gardner: And also Patrick Tickle, Executive Vice President of Products at Planview. Thanks, Patrick.

Tickle: Absolutely. It's great to be here.

Gardner:
And thanks also to our audience for joining this special podcast coming
to you directly from the recent 2013 VMworld Conference in San Francisco. I'm
Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host
throughout this series of VMware sponsored BriefingsDirect discussions.
Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

Transcript
of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how two companies are enhancing their
services and transforming their businesses using VMware cloud-computing
infrastructure and a unified approach to cloud-infrastructure
management. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2013. All rights
reserved.